‘Parking is a hot topic! There have been an extraordinary number of cases involving parking disputes over the last few decades, almost certainly because the absence of a right to park can substantially reduce the value of both commercial and residential land.’

‘A priest who denied stealing a dead parishioner’s blue badge so he could park for free said he was telling the “gospel truth.” Father Bill Haymaker, accompanied to Hove Crown Court by his official clerical dog The Venerable Mr Piddles, was found guilty of stealing the badge from woman who had died two months before and then using it in his own car.’

‘The claimant owners of a fish and chip shop claimed as a result of use over a number of years to have acquired by prescription the right for themselves and others using their premises to park on land comprising part of a car park belonging to the defendants. The defendants’ premises, which were next to the car park, had been used as a club and users of those premises used the car park. The entrance to the car park was adjacent to the claimants’ shop. The claimants had operated the shop from about 1987 or 1988 until 2012. Throughout that time, their suppliers had up to nine times a week pulled off the road into the disputed part of the car park and parked there for long enough to make their deliveries, and their customers had parked on the disputed land while they bought their fish and chips. On the whole that use of part of the car park did not interfere with the s’ operations but over a seven-year period there were 12 to 15 occasions on which the defendants asserted ownership of the disputed land, and, expressly or impliedly, asserted that the claimants and their suppliers and customers had no right to park on it. At all times until 2007 there was a sign attached to the wall of the building on one side of the entranceway to the car park, erected on behalf of the defendants, stating “Private car park. For the use of Club patrons only. By order of the Committee”, and a similar sign in the window of the club premises. The claimants claimed that their right to park, acquired by prescription by “lost modern grant”, had been established by their 20 years’ uninterrupted user “as of right”, namely, without force, without secrecy and without permission. The First-tier Tribunal found that, although the two signs were clearly visible, they were insufficient to prevent the claimants from acquiring the claimed parking rights. The Upper Tribunal allowed the defendants’ appeal, reversing that finding.’

‘The Supreme Court has provided long awaited clarification of the law on penalty clauses and liquidated damages, upholding the “penalty rule” but further limiting its utility in a commercial setting. In the adjoined appeals of Cavendish Square Holding v Talal El Makdessi and ParkingEye Limited v Beavis the Supreme Court created a new authority for consideration of the penalty rule doctrine, termed by Lordships Neuberger and Sumption to be “an ancient, haphazardly constructed edifice which has not weathered well”.’

‘Reports of the decision of the Supreme Court in the joined appeals in Cavendish Square and ParkingEye left me confused because some reckoned the decision represented a narrowing of the application of the penalty doctrine whilst others considered it had expanded the doctrine’s scope. So on a wet weekend afternoon I took hold of a copy of the Judgment – [2015] UKSC 67- and tasked myself to find out. Here is what I found.’

‘This week the UK Supreme Court gave a single decision on a pair of wildly different cases. They involved a chip shop owner overstaying in a retail car park and the heavily negotiated sale of a substantial Middle Eastern advertising group. (Cavendish Square v El Makdessi and ParkingEye v Beavis) Why? Because they both concerned the idea of a penalty clause – very roughly, a clause that is unenforceable because it imposes an exorbitant obligation to pay on a party that breaches a contract.’

‘Never, it seems, should you underestimate the British public’s hatred of parking charges. When Barry Beavis, an Essex chip shop owner, asked the public for money to help take his appeal against an £85 parking ticket to the highest court in the land, he doubted he would get anything.’